Jeremy Harding

Susannah Clapp’s memoir of Bruce Chatwin has little in the way of hard-going and nothing of the comprehensive record that bloats a literary biography. It makes no claims about the relation between a writer’s life and work that weren’t already clear from Chatwin’s career, and tends to confirm that the real waywardness of this ur-traveller lay in his darting and musing and drifting intelligence: the long list of places visited, sights seen, hinterlands crossed can seem like a vulgar indiscretion by comparison – the mind, not the world, was Chatwin’s oyster. One of the strengths of this memoir is that it narrows the field: Susannah Clapp is not for traipsing round West Africa or Tibet, preferring to work the Chatwin itineraries elegantly and sparsely into what is very much a home-turf story, from Sheffield, to Birmingham, Wiltshire, London, Edinburgh, Gloucestershire, Wales and the Borders, with stints in Europe and the US thrown in.’

The soldiers of fortune who followed the wake of crisis in Africa during the Sixties and Seventies were almost always bound to clandestinity – the public bragging came later. In most cases they were sourly and implacably opposed to national liberation, which they saw as a Communist conspiracy on behalf of an inferior race that had failed to identify its interests with those of its betters. For the mercenaries who fought in Katanga at the time of the Congo disaster or in Angola before independence, anti-Communist ideology had a useful subsuming role: greed, adventurism and some brusque racial views were comfortably rolled up into a defence of the free world.

Not many people have the good fortune to die well, and fewer still to live well, but by all accounts Wolde-ab Wolde Mariam managed the first as respectably as he had the second. He died in May at the age of 87 in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, which became the 52nd sovereign state in Africa two years ago. Wolde-ab was buried in the cemetery of Tsetserat and a day of national mourning was declared. Hadas Ertra, the main newspaper, ran a long eulogy and published a photo of this frail old man taken forty years earlier or more – a mugshot posted by the Agordat police with the offer of a reward for news of Wolde-ab’s whereabouts. The face is robust and solid, suggesting a resilient physique, which must have been the case, for he survived four very close calls – there were seven assassination attempts in all – during the first phase of his life as a militant for Eritrean independence.’

The West likes the Ebola story which, at first sight, seems to confirm our ‘continentalist’ views of Africa. The foreign pages in Britain aren’t teeming with reports from Kikwit by Zairois journalists. There are few, I guess, even in Belgian or French newspapers, despite the fact that Zaire is one of the largest Francophone countries in the world. There is no shortage of able journalists in Zaire, but they are working as baggage-handlers at the airport, driving cabs, trading up on petty merchandise for meagre profits. There are good doctors too, who have little to work with and nothing to lose, once the point of no return is reached, as it was in Kikwit before the World Health Organisation arrived. (In clinical terms, infected medics represent phase two of the outbreak, and there’ve been enough of them in the epicentre to suggest that health workers in Kikwit take their duties seriously.) Yet the Eurocentric view of African disasters seldom allows for non-European skills to play a mitigating role and, for this reason alone, the coverage of the Ebola virus, with its stress on the strengths of the hospital staff, feels different.